The 1990's have been remarkable for the explosive growth of the Internet from an specialized system used by academia to a widespread medium for the transfer of information and electronic commerce.
The "Internet" was developed in the 1970's with funding from the Department of Defense to interconnect university computer systems. Until recently, Internet usage was largely confined to academic circles to send e-mail, chat and access remote files and computer resources. The Internet application programs to perform e-mail, chat and the remote access of data were, in large part, command intensive and did not provide an easy to use graphical user interface.
The explosive growth of the Internet has been fueled, in large part, by the development and wide adoption of the HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP). HTTP is the Internet protocol used to transfer documents and other Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME) type data between systems. HTTP is the protocol on which the World Wide Web ("the web") is based. To the Internet user, the web is an easy to use graphical user interface that provides "point-and-click" access to data from an enormous number of remote computers.
The communication technology of the web can be explained by analogy to the Open System Interconnect Model (OSI) for computer communication. HTTP resides above the Transport Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) layers and provides a transfer protocol between the web server and the browser client. TCP/IP divides networking functionality into only four layers: (1) a network interface layer that corresponds to the OSI link layer, (2) an Internet layer which corresponds to the OSI network layer (3) a transport layer which corresponds to the OSI transport layer and (4) an application layer which corresponds to the session, presentation and application layers of the OSI model. The web browser (client) may correspond to the application layer of the OSI model and Hyper-Text Markup Language may correspond to the presentation layer.
The Hyper-Text Markup Language (HTML) is the software language in which most of the web is written. HTML is basically ASCII text surrounded by HTML commands in angled brackets. HTML commands are interpreted by a web browser to determine how to display a web page.
The web, as a whole, is made up of web page servers and web browsers that provide a hardware and operating system independent environment. A web browser is an application program that interprets and displays HTML pages. The web is hardware and operating system independent because of the common HTTP and HTML protocols and languages used between the web servers and the browser client applications.
HTML web pages usually contain links or HyperText that point to other HTML pages on the web. By pointing and clicking on these links, a user can skip or "surf" from page to page on the web.
A primary function of a web browser is to display the page located at an Universal Resource Location (URL) address. A URL is an address that includes the protocol to reference the data, the system path and data filename. The data file addressed by the URL data filename is located on a server.
One aspect of the way in which HTML supports the display of data is through the support of "frames." Frame support can be defined as the ability of a web browser to split the browser display area into separate "framed" display areas. Each display area, or frame, can contain information from a separate web page and/or point to a separate URL address. Frames can be created to present the user with a simultaneous coordinated presentation of multiple frames while maintaining the look-and-feel of a single web page.
Another feature in most web browsers is the ability to "bookmark" a page. Typically, the web browser stores a plurality of bookmarked pages in a non-volatile storage mechanism where they may be retrieved when the browser is reactivated. A bookmark is a reference to a single URL address.
The use of bookmarks presents a problem for web pages that are designed for display as multiple coordinated, or framed, web pages. A bookmark is a reference to a single URL address. A frame based web page, however, simultaneously displays multiple URL addressed web pages. Therefore, a bookmark created when viewing a frame based web page stores only one URL address, where multiple URL addresses are required to properly display the frame based data. When the user attempts to re-access the page with the bookmark, the browser display will only load one frame, which provides only part of the coordinated framed presentation of data.
Another service found on the web is the ability to search for information. Search services such as Yahoo.TM., Excite.TM., Lycos.TM., Infoseek.TM. and Hotbot.TM. provide a means for searching web pages and other information on the Internet that return references to URL address of web pages and other data that satisfy the search criteria. For the most part, these search services use a keyword search to find web pages and other information that satisfies the search request.
The web has created a forum that provides a very low cost way to publish information, views and opinion. This inexpensive way to publish information has resulted in an explosion in the amount of data available on the web. Ironically, the success of the web has created its own problems, namely how to separate informed views and authoritative information from uninformed views and unreliable information. The present invention addresses this problem by providing useful, novel and non-obvious methods and apparatus to point to and find quality information available on the Internet.